Yorkshire Hangmen

By Stephen Wade

From the eighteenth century, York was one of the places employing its own hangmen, copying London and Newgate, even to the use of the word Tyburn to define it's Knavesmire gallows, also known as the 'three-legged mare'. That was where highwayman Dick Turpin met his fate; but later, in the Victorian period, Armley Gaol in Leeds also became a hanging prison, the site of the death of the notorious killer Charlie Peace. The tales of the villains and the victims are well documented, but Stephen Wade also provides us with the stories of both Yorkshire-born hangmen and others who worked in Leeds, Hull or Wakefield. For the first time, Yorkshire's Hangmen brings together the tales of the lives and professional careers of these men, some famous, others long forgotten, who held a morbid fascination for the public. Their trade was mysterious, revolting and yet justified by many famous figures in history. The book includes accounts of killers, spies and traitors meeting their doom, but also tells something of the personalities of the hangmen, and of their moral dilemmas as they had to hang women and young people as well as hardened villains. Many of the executioners suffered terrible depression; some took their own lives, and others, such as the famous Albert Pierrepoint, even questioned their work in later life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 20, 2008
• ISBN: 9781844688548

Stephen Wade

Stephen Wade is a biographer and social historian, usually associated with crime and law, but here he turns his attention to a place he has known for forty years, as he has lived and worked in Scunthorpe all that time. His most recent books have been "Going to Extremes", "The Justice Women" and three volumes in the "Your Town in the Great War" series (all Pen & Sword), and :No More Soldiering" (Amberley).

Book preview

Introduction

pg6_01 here are many words for this profession: doomster, mate of death, staffman, the topping cove – but he is simply the ‘hangman’. This was the man who had the resolve and the will to walk on a scaffold with a pinioned man, place a hood on the man’s head, slip on a prepared noose so that it knotted at just the right point, perhaps whisper a final word and pull a lever that would send the victim to eternity. When James Berry, from Bradford, applied for the job, he wrote:

I beg most respectfully to apply to you, to ask if you will permit me to conduct the execution of the two convicts now lying under sentence of death at Edinburgh. I was very intimate with Mr Marwood and he made me thoroughly acquainted with his system of carrying out his work …

It suggests a certain quality of smooth confidence, entirely devoid of defined motivation for doing the work. It could have been a brief to build a new apartment block. Berry noted that he had seen Mr Calcraft ‘execute three persons at Manchester thirteen years ago’. The magistrates of Edinburgh must have thought that they had the right kind of obsessive on their hands. For more than a decade he had harboured a wish to do what Calcraft had done, and he had been apprentice to the Lincolnshire man who had studied how to kill by asphyxiation rather than slow strangling.

Yorkshire has had no monopoly of these types, but certainly more than her fair share.

For centuries of English history, men and women were killed by judicial sanction and command, either by hanging or beheading. In some instances there were killings more barbarous than we can imagine today, such as the fact that until the early nineteenth century we had a law on the statute books that meant a wife killing a husband would be burned to death whereas a husband killing a wife would be hanged. Until Sir Robert Peel’s first spell at the Home Office in the 1820s there were over 200 capital crimes in the criminal law known as the ‘Bloody Code.’ The deaths of felons on the scaffold meant a major public spectacle, something to rival a popular drama on stage or a bear-baiting contest. Crowds would turn out, some to abuse and revile a murderer and some to hope that the recreant would pray and beg for pardon, make a noble speech and call on his God.

Of course, they would not leap to their deaths and save the state a task: someone had to hang them or behead them, burn them or draw and quarter them. In most cases it was a job for the hangman. From the earliest period, these men were convicts turned executioner to save their skin or to avoid transportation. It was an occupation that existed on the cusp between ghoulish horror and grudging, awesome respect. Some hangmen were to become minor celebrities and earned money lecturing; others wrote memoirs. But on the other hand, many were ruined by drink or took their own lives. The hangman was a figure of dark and menacing myth: a character to frighten children or inhabit a Gothic mystery tale. As the nineteenth century wore on, they became the focus of much media interest, more fascinating to the Victorians as attitudes to hanging changed, moving from public to private after 1868, and always going on while agitators and reformists battled for its abolition. The work of the hangman and the spectacle of the death on the scaffold attracted many famous people: Charles Dickens had a fascination with execution and wrote against its continuance, with fervour and conviction. Thomas Hardy, whose character Tess is hanged at the end of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, relished the sight of criminals at the end of a rope and he wrote fiction that involved the myths and superstitions around hanging.

The hangman did a job that very few would even consider doing. Despite the fact that many of them wrote down their reasons for doing that awful duty for the state, the deep motivations in them are still perhaps a mystery. The journalist Robert Patrick Wilson, in his memoirs, writes of a meeting with William Calcraft the Essex hangman in which he is given the simplest but perhaps most tenable reason: that good citizens would all be murdered in their beds if the killers were not removed from existence. Would it were that simple; the truth is that for the century and a half covered by this book, it is certain that several people were hanged for minor thefts; women were hanged and in disgusting legal contexts of failure, insensitivity and bungling; some teenagers were hanged and also some people undoubtedly since proved innocent of the crime.

When Wilson ventured into Newgate, in 1870, he recalled a story that educates us today with regard to the sheer in-humanity of the execution process before the innovations of William Marwood who implemented a more informed method of using the knot and drop distance to make death more speedy. Wilson wrote about a hanging of a man called Jeffreys:

When Jeffreys walked on the scaffold and reached the drop he faced St. Sepulchre’s church. Calcraft hurriedly and very forcibly turned him round with his back to the church. The awful ceremony occupied a very much longer time than is now taken to bring about death. Calcraft was compelled to walk several yards along the scaffold and return the same way beneath it. All this time the wretched person remained in full view of a densely packed crowd, until with a wild shout from the mob, the condemned dropped…

There had been centuries of such bungling, delay and torture, as death was unnecessarily prolonged, with little thought given to the consideration of the convict’s situation.

The hangmen of Yorkshire were, in the first phase of this history, mostly men working in York; this extended well into the nineteenth century when Armley Gaol came on the scene as a place with a death cell and scaffold, as a consequence of the assizes passing from York to Leeds. But York has gone down in the history books as the place where several infamous villains and also a number of political prisoners either exited the world or spent years being forgotten by the world. York was where Turpin was hanged, on the Knavesmire; it was where Askern and Curry practised their hangman’s craft, the latter coping with his drink problem as he had more and more trade coming his way, particularly difficult for him when he had to hang women.

The dominating figure of James Berry from Bradford takes centre stage after that period, when he travelled the country as the national hangman. He was a complex character, and his memoirs, along with material in a recent biography of him, provide us with a profound insight into the stresses and strains of the work. He might have had a business card and seemed to revel in the notoriety his work brought, but the fact is that after he retired he was contemplating suicide and was only saved from that fate by a chance encounter with an evangelist on a railway platform.

The assistant hangmen have left little as historical record, but we have fragments about the Huddersfield man, Thomas Scott. Also Bartholomew Binns, a shopkeeper from Dewsbury, is something of a one-dimensional figure. But as soon as we move into the dynasties of hangmen we have much more in the historical record: the profession certainly ran in families up until the abolition of the death penalty in 1964: first the Billingtons and then the Pierrepoints fulfilled the role for a very long time. Steve Fielding’s recent biography of the Pierrepoints has revealed details we did not have before about the remarkable Albert Pierrepoint in particular, subject of a film in 2006, to add to the public awareness of this occupation.

The last group of hangmen in the final twenty years of hanging proved to be fascinating studies of the mentalities and dis-positions of people drawn to the craft. Steve Wade of Doncaster and Syd Dernley from North Nottinghamshire illustrate clearly the bizarre eccentricity of dark humour and coldness of the hangman. Dernley courted the camera and the media; Steve Wade was the opposite, a man who ran a bus company in Doncaster at one time, and then spent time helping to hang German spies at Wandsworth.

Hanging as the state’s penalty for murder goes back a very long way; it was the usual method used in Anglo-Saxon times. The gallows were used by those peoples, and as one historian has written, in the Middle Ages: ‘Every town, every abbey and almost every large manorial lord had the right of hanging, and a gallows or tree, with a man hanging upon it, was so frequent an object in the country, that it seems to have been considered as almost a natural an object of a landscape …’ Some of the earliest hangings in Yorkshire that we have on record are those inflicted by the Admiral of the Humber, from 1451, when the Court of Admiralty of the Humber had this written direction for justices:

You masters of the quest, if you … discover or disclose anything of the King’s Secret counsel, or of the counsel of your fellows… you are to be, and shall be, had down to the low water mark, where must be made three times, O Yes, for the King, and then this punishment, by the law prescribed, shall be executed upon them…

Before the proper records of Victorian hangings were kept, it becomes harder to find statistics on the range of crimes for which men were hanged, but one record from 1835 gives some facts about Lincoln hangings and these provide a list typical of all parts of the land: the list shows the horrible difference mentioned above, between hanging for wife-murder and burning for husband murder (which was high treason, not murder, technically). The writer notes: ‘1722: Eleanor Elsam burnt to death near the gallows for the murder of her husband.’ Then the statistics for the century after 1725 show that thirty-one hangings were for murder and most others for highway robbery or stealing of cattle. But there were executions for sodomy, rape and theft in that period.

Of course, Yorkshire also contained the infamous Halifax gibbet, so the county gained a terrible reputation regarding crime and punishment. The old lines of ‘From Hull and Halifax and Hell the good Lord deliver us’ certainly comes partly from that old gibbet lore. The general common law of the land, not allowing localities to execute their own criminals, had not applied to Halifax. It was useful in deterring the thieves who were likely to cut and run away with cloth on frames around the Calder valley. From 1541, forty-nine people were beheaded on the gibbet. One entry for 1623 explains a great deal about the attitudes behind this punishment: ‘George Fairbank, an abandoned scoundrel, commonly called Skoggin because of his wickedness, together with Anna his spuria (pretended) daughter, both of them were deservedly beheaded on account of their manifest thefts.’

But Halifax was the exception to a general rule of law which, from early in the nineteenth century through to the final hangings in Manchester in 1964, relied on the noose as a deterrent. Whether it was such a thing or not is open to debate, but along with the story of Yorkshire’s hangmen comes the ongoing fight to abolish the death penalty. Few private citizens were as zealous in that cause then Violet van der Elst, whose book, On the Gallows, chronicles a series of hangings and reprieves as dramatic as anything in the records themselves. She became a familiar figure around the Yorkshire prisons, and elsewhere, being noisy and obstructive in her pursuit of abolition.

More traditionally, with campaigns being done through official channels, we have a succession of reformers, from Samuel Romilly in the Regency period through to Arthur Koestler in the 1950s; their stories inevitably involved part of the records of the lives of hangmen.

In assembling these stories, I have been indebted to several people and places: the encyclopaedic writings of John Eddleston on hangings have been invaluable, together with the biographies of Berry and of the Pierrepoints by Stewart Evans and Steve Fielding. Help from Jo Jenkinson at Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council Archives and staff at the University of Hull